I’ve re-installed my home Linux installation again. I seem to be the master in configuring it to pieces. These days, however, i don’t worry, and i even take a backup copy before i do things that may be a bit too drastic for survival.

At home i use the SimplyMEPIS Linux because it’s a Debian derivative, it’s dead easy to install, and it has nvidia drivers built into the distro. The other day, i thought it was about time to upgrade my Mepis. I edited the apt sources according to the Mepis-lovers’ blog, did an apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade (and an apt-get –fix-broken dist-upgrade) and kaboom, nothing worked. Well, okay, i still had the commandline and all my data, but it wasn’t really what i could consider a useful setup.

In goes the Mepis installation disk i burned a year ago. Foop, everything is back. Mepis would even preserve the /home partition, so my personal data would have been safe even if i hadn’t backed up before upgrading. Wow. However, the old Mepis i had on CD also had old Firewire drivers (i suppose), so whenever i wanted to retrieve a file from my external hard drive, over ssh from my Windows laptop, my home box froze.

Did the dist-upgrade thing again but it broke my system. Fetched a new fresh ISO copy of Mepis from mepis.org, instaled (yeah, it preserved my /home again) and -foop- everything works like it should. KDE even remembers my desktop settings. I feel so at home. And as extra spice, my external hard drive now appears at the desktop using its name, helmer (after John Helmer. My internal hard disk is labelled hogarth), and there’s a fish tank from Sherman’s Lagoon on the taskbar — which gives me an oddly DNA-esque feeling

The story doesn’t end here though. The next Mepis distribution will be built on the Ubuntu base. Ubuntu Linux is a very nice Linux distribution with a very nice philosophy. Or more geekly put, it’s a Debian Linux that works. I use kubuntu (Ubuntu on KDE) on my Linux laptop. And i love it. But (k)ubuntu doesn’t include some non-free stuff like an mp3 decoder or the proprietary nvidia driver with hardware OpenGL acceleration, so i don’t want to use it on my home box. But i suspect these will continue to be built into Mepis. So it’s happy happy joy joy to the new marriage!